to keep
a soul
in its harbor

love hard

then
harder.

when I walk around I see
it oozing out of everyone

a need. they are dying

incredible and luscious and
in you I found it.

With you I can put the ooze back into
everyone.

so their eyes will brighten back up

teeth saying yes.

saving them is how
I could love you again.

there's not a pain like
an opened peony
ephemerally twisting a knife
of how beautiful and limited your time is
in its flourescence.

the pain of
preparing yourself
for next May, same time,
as the flower, paper-petaled,
a delicacy,
will be rooted here after you're gone.

this legacy you won't leave,
with its ancestors of the ants crawling on its buds,
to which you resign to yourself,
to the peony, the ants,
'that is fine by me.'

My soul is burrowed
into the glacial moraine of Ohio,
next to a maple planted by my ancestors
that I don't get to measure anymore by its canopy
of katydids out of tune.

In the middle of winter,
I'm ice fishing, taking care
not to fall through, gliding along the ice
a shoe skater,
dad watching but not too close.

Even horizon of brown trees promising
a green of summer so we can
appreciate our humid hair,
my sisters and I sweating in the lake, ducking
out of the way of murderous horse flies.

In summer, I would soak the mulberries
to get out the bugs
and then eat them by the pound
fingers stained,
too impatient to bake them in a pie.

On mother's day, I'd cut the lilacs planted by my great
great grandmother  
and bring them inside.
They are so short-lived.

All of it
incredibly short-lived.

you have taught me love
in the flourescence of adulthood,
but that can be dark and you can be dark,  
all of it in and out of body.

you teach me how to long for a season
and hate it at the same time.

teach me a forgiveness whose holiness is
captured by memories of you kneeling and my not,
didn't care if I couldn't, let the tallness of the everything
wrap around me, protecting me,
and you're on the floor, kneeling.

eucharist in your hand and you're crying.

you have taught me how to release.
I am hanging onto sunken words, a promise,
that maybe not today or tonight or on Christmas
whenever
you're in town and I'm in town
or I'm astral even,
that the story is real.

many stories had ended long ago
and ours will eventually,
untold if ever
and if told,
will evaporate with the two of us,
separated by panes of glass.

like when I had my first
****** at age seven

sister in the bed next to me
the first time, wholly.

the boys would cauterize everything.
their hands lacking the softness
of innocence
of love.

the first was a cousin
egged on by his father

I was under a blanket.

later, a boyfriend
he played football.
his persistence would last hours
the movie theater, the car
pressing on me, over my jeans.

souring the human need
the trust that I'll survive.

none of it violent
but it made me violent.

grandfather told me
he killed a man
not on purpose, but all the same

on a backroad of Oklahoma
black-inked air
and body
compounding the tire.

Gigi buttoned up
but loose

narcissus in the vase

Easter again,
with pedigreed agreeables,
plotting escape.

I travel through
twisted sheets

finding my way back to your body
out of a dream
where you died.

to ground the morning back,
I run my hand over your side
up to your hair
you stir, pressing into me.

my hand is like a weight.

I am drinking you:
a gossamer tonic

my fullness returns

there will be a time when
I will wake up and I'm all apart---

and maybe you go before me.

until then

tie me back tie me back

sunday night idles, rattling

it is air
just after a funeral.

guilty from a stolen, wasted hour---
reversing a rebate.

this morning I am feeling
my way through it.

settled, comfortable,
feeding myself.

the sun is rising earlier.

there is a magic history in the birds
I hear for the first time
since winter began

they are the truest thing
I know.

Through uncommon tears,
I said "I love you"
in the basement, under a
de riguer traffic light.

I so wonderfully executed
shedding parts of me
that didn't fit to you---  
but you peeled me,
rind and all.

you said that if
"I were to start reading it,
John is a good place to start"

You said we were not
'evenly yoked,'

and I said
that we are not oxen.

once you've seen many,
alpine lakes are a formula:
ice, snowpack, and gravity.

a few feet deep
with rippled-edged pebbles
beat down by millions of years
of heave, freeze, thaw, flow.  

reflecting the cirque:
a giant cupping it all.

there was ruin
and I was seventeen,
terra firma
crows above.

the last eight years wrought
into a homecoming taking place
inside your Rav 4,
of all places.

all my memories of this
exist inside your vehicles

my dna too.

you want the past back?
we dredge it up---
stickiness and sweat.

you wear the same clothes:
tennis team-issued t-shirt
and basketball shorts,
of all things.

i’ve a gun now,
and it would be the time.
the crowing is louder.

if what i endure is pious,
then I’ll be a Catholic
like you.

I will go out into the world
feel everything
come home
reverberate in silence

do it all again tomorrow.

(why not?
it is a poetic place to be)

I think I was here in a past life as a whale
I saw it happen
the cleaving, millions later, the taking
I might have been there
when pangaea heaved herself out
this coastline, primordial
designed to be passed through,
remembered
lest we get bored and forget about
all the stolen land

rare Romantic sublime
lapis, aquamarine, sapphire
all at bat with black cliffs

you must digest it all quickly
say you have been
long to return
but maybe not.

i was too immobilized
to dance with you

now

I want to smash it all
your life, your religion
and swirl the pieces around
in the atmosphere
materialize them
back in front of me
hold them
in my hand.

Heads up
at gilded cielos and ceilings
a time when extravagance was bilious
and public.

relics and
the coronation of Napoleon
sublime impositions and plaster,
some marble. Gobs of it.

Oils and linens
of faces, faces.
How could we remember it all
in hallways and corners
and monstrous great rooms?

my gut feels like
it's back in Ohio  

my sister remembers when
(no, don't bring it up again)

there was a dog and and he had a gun
and I would always be the one
to run toward things
when I should have hidden

about twelve shots of tequila in him
and a rifle wobbling
and my sisters sobbing
he pulls my hair to teach me a lesson

I pull them all in my
little purple Hyundai  
and drive away

I like getting lost in the rhythm I can
turn
you over and over in my
head like feet
like pulling a wagon behind me
chained to my hips I run I
am away but I can
drag you close

i've wanted to send you a poem
not one that I have written
that would sit in your gut
and remind you that what
i want is to be bitten.

heat from you is still on me

choose your absence
but pull me along---
I am muddled.

you'll toss 'you're _'
to me
and I will file it away
for the times when you are.

heat from you is still on me

you'll slip beneath me
and I will dissolve:
particled up and neutral.

mother moves
always wearing:
white linen, a skirt
carrying children with electric hair

if I hadn't stopped to say hello
I'd think her phantasmagoric
and if she hadn't turned the faucet on
I'd think I invented her
floating thin, dutiful.

I'm a casual hinderance
at times welcome
curve of my thigh:
a negotiating chip.

You're the receptacle
for my childless spiral
token I'm saving:
a bad habit.

you're probably with your family today
I think you had a baby a week ago
I can see you  
grilling and face-tired.

it's a different life
we don't talk about
never routines or
the mundane
why do you need to?

I am not real
and you may not love me
like I've woven mine for you.

we owe each other nothing,  
have our softness to lose
you, with your life on a scroll
the way you need it to.

I will never be a factor
not a friend at a party
not your kid's teacher
not someone from church
not across the street

you will wake up every day
aged and flat.
and I will wake up
and breathe.

I won't die until you will
after all, you woke me up from a death
and have been killing me for years, so--

when my soul detaches it will find you
to whatever is next
mundane soul retirees

or

if yours careens intergalactic
you can bet mine will be right there
in final solidarity, never minding the beauty
swirling in milky stars.

we didn’t wreck, no
did not even bump---  
so why are little parts of your skull,
fractured and eternal,
inside mine?  

It happened in a second
At 85 miles per hour  
you hear it on the news all the time.

I’ll hoard all these tiny moments
and force them into meaning
til you are in oblivion,
addled and blind.

lately, time's an unremembered ghost
floating thin and haunting me with empty sound
and if I need to yell
to send it back
I'll open my mouth and I'll bring it down

what's been asleep's dissolved into the air
I'm back and the trees are a little fuller,
faces more beaten
time is winning
but if I need to blow it up to clean it,
I will

when I see you, sour light around you
I wonder if it's because you never left
and your eyes do not change
they never did
but I feel you crumbling hiding in the black

I want to wash you up
get you better
get you better
pull the little roots up
get you, better

lately, time's an unfriendly ghost
floating thin and haunting me
with empty sound
and if I need to yell, to send it back
I will open my mouth just to bring it down.

restrained
another story, another thought
all the while a loss
a million different scenarios I can live
and grieve them impossible.

it was a nothing
an afterthought that
got misplaced under that envelope
from that thing

and I was
---going to say---

(the chicken’s burning)
(you’re fixing it)  

that I was thinking of
--not being, what that’d be like--
for a little bit, you know,

figure things out?

A word enters my vein,
cornflower-blue and cozied up
to tendons.

A detached one is enough.
Slipped through and careless
it careens and dopamines
a single small heavyweight
that burns low then evaporates
among bronchioles.  

Where you came from, you burn also
and turn over in your sleep as if you know
a word was created and travelled,
and the split-long beam
travels ahead in lurid exposure.

I am waiting for another,
a child
beside all the addicts in the world, in
fiendish camaraderie.

Sparkling honey-colored liquid  
waits, a bored date,
a veil of ten thousand beads.

Why not just
stop?
Why not just?
You are not a prisoner.
Can walk away, heels turning up and over stones
without a ****.
Why not?
Why?

You----
variant of swilling ancestry
dug up and replanted 1685 miles
to miss a death, a birth, a marriage or two
still can be seated down
and the similarity is striking
when we hold the glass.

You---
wishing to escape an invisible trap
you maybe knew at one point existed
but drank it in and conquered it
so you thought
why not?

weaving
in and out of short pines
a fly travels to the top of a mountain

while I stand in my underwear
and the incandescent

staring into a mirror, into a mirror
and on
as we all have.

swelling and leeching
on this street, was once
where I saw them fighting
and where we drank
and sat while others arrested.

To not be here would surely mean
that he’s giving up
in wondering what a city does for us,
flocking to the next big thing to grow
it out of proportion.

I am unobserved
allowed to breathe in and out
in solitude as
the babies are centered,
polished dollops of putty
to be observed as if
the greatest mystery of the world
has been solved.